I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

The true object of all human life is play.

Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.

For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

Affirming words from moms and dads are like light switches. Speak a word of affirmation at the right moment in a child's life and it's like lighting up a whole roomful of possibilities.

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Red Bull are backing a spinal-injury research charity called Wings For Life, which I am an ambassador for, with a programme called Faces for Charity that will run at this year's British Grand Prix.

If we don't empower women, we don't allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.

My perspective comes in part from being a New York black lady, in part from being an engineer. I know I'm smart and have opinions worth being heard.